What Happend to Hockey Fans After the NHL Lockout?

In this All Habs piece, I used some sociology to assess why the fans, after they expressed so much anger, were so quick to return to hockey after the NHL lockout came to an end. To help me sort this out, I interviewed sociologist Matt Loveland (LeMoyne College) and two mega hockey fans, Roy MacGregor (Globe and Mail) and Bruce Dinsmore (Montreal actor and organizer of a fan boycott against the NHL). This piece helps to show why that mainstream reports of fan disillusionment with the NHL were highly exaggerated.

Reconcilable Differences! The Return of the Fans to the NHL

 
By Avi Goldberg 

As we roll to the trade deadline of this shortened hockey season, it’s hard to believe that only months ago many of us were cursing the NHL and the players for depriving us of our game. We can easily recall the anger we felt during the lockout, but we may blush as we admit just how easily we let it evaporate when the action returned. Following-up on the effects of the lockout on the fans, I have gone to two known lovers of hockey and to one expert in human behaviour. At the risk of opening old wounds, I use their views to help make sense of how fan bitterness appears to have been forgotten so soon after the lockout came to an end.

You can continue to read the piece in its entirety here.

Digital Media & Hockey Reporting

In this All Habs piece, I respond to some recent mainstream writing that has celebrated the power of new media to allow fans and bloggers to influence both sports leagues and the sports media. To assess this issue in more nuanced way than what has appeared in the mainstream press, I interviewed Elliotte Friedman (CBC), Larry Brooks (New York Post), Darren Dreger (TSN), and Michael Grange (Sportsnet) to get their impressions on how the new media world has affected their hockey reporting and writing and on whether social media allowed hockey fans to influence the NHL and the NHLPA as they worked to end last season's lockout.

Digital Voices: Social Media, Hockey Reporting, and the Fans

By Avi Goldberg

In the ongoing consideration of the effects of social media, one unsolved puzzle is the extent to which digital technologies are changing human communications and interactions. And, with members of the media increasingly relying on Twitter to cover events of all kinds, it’s not surprising that this issue has been addressed in relation to reporting on sports in particular.

Think about the Manti Te’o hoax. Though it sounds alarm bells about the state of contemporary relationships, the fact that it demonstrates digital media’s potential to upend traditional sports journalism has drawn attention as well. Similarly, in a recent Globe and Mail piece on its impact on the hockey lockout, Bruce Dowbiggin argued that social media “emerged [from the lockout] as a powerful voice by defying the [NHL] and traditional media who have long brushed them off.”

In terms of new media and reporting on the world of hockey, are we witnessing fundamental change for the better or merely incremental modifications of that which existed before?

To explore this question, I canvassed the views of a handful of well-known mainstream hockey reporters. Based on their routine work that straddles real and virtual frontiers, the consensus among them is that digital media is promoting a significant evolution in hockey reporting, but not a revolutionary and uniformly positive transformation.

You can continue to read the piece in its entirety here.

Digesting That NHL Lockout Thing

In this piece, I present my thoughts on a few major dynamics I paid attention to during the suddenly resolved NHL lockout. On the very day I am posting this, hockey fans in Montreal and Canada are anxiously waiting for training camps to open and for the abbreviated 48 game race to the Canada Day Stanley Cup Finals to begin.  

 

113 Days of What, Exactly? The ‘Catelli’ Lockout

By Avi Goldberg

I know that we’re all sick and tired of the lockout. And, though it won’t be long before hockey fans in Canada get back into the routine of the games, many of us are also somewhat troubled by what we and local businesses and their workers have had to endure over the last 113 days. As we wait for the sides to ratify the new CBA, and for a feverishly short training camp to prepare for a feverishly short season, I’ve reflected and come up with five issues that summarize what I think went down. I will explore some of these issues again in the future but let’s hope that most of them can now be permanently put to rest.

You can continue to read the piece in its entirety here.

Lockout Politics

This piece is the first official contribution I made to the digital hockey magazine AllHabs.net as a Featured Contributor.

While many fans lament the ways that economics and power struggles have kept hockey off the ice during the current lockout, in this piece I explore the historical connections between sports, politics, economics, and culture.  After understanding the ways that sports is used by societies to promote, and argue over, its most cherished social values, I suggest that fans use these connections to get involved in trying to bring the game of hockey back and to contribute to the social needs of the societies and communities in which they live.

You can read the digital version here.

The Politics of Sports and the Hockey Lockout

By Avi Goldberg

It’s been a rough couple of years for hockey fans in general and for fans of the Montreal Canadiens in particular.  Between the lockout, intractable negotiations over arena deals, and intense scrutiny over whether the Habs coach and GM must be bilingual, much attention has been focused away from the game of hockey itself.  While resentment of the presence of politics, economics, or culture within what we like to think of a realm of play is understandable, ties between sports and core features of society cannot be unravelled.  We may choose to shy away, but awareness of those ties can give us control when the perceived contamination of sports by societal issues leads us to feel as though we have none.

Because humans have always imagined their sports as representing their most valued social characteristics and aspirations, direct resemblances between politics, economics, culture and sports can be traced far back into history.

Ancient Greece, birthplace of modern democracy, was known for a liberal approach to life and for enlightened politics in which citizens joined together in discussion and decision making over community affairs.  Contours of this participatory philosophy and other societal features were grafted onto sports practices of the Classical Greek era.

Echoing Greek politics, values of fair play and equality in competition were taught to students in physical education classes in the national education system and were also intricately applied to events in the ancient Olympic Games.  Exemplifying additional sports-society links, ancient Greek athletics displayed core social values through their public enactment of rituals that characterized Greek religion.  Greek athletics were not merely about physical fitness.  The organization of sports highlighted revered social priorities.  Participation signalled honouring of the gods as well as efforts to bring divinely granted good fortune to the community.     

Whereas participation, fairness, and religious practice were fundamental virtues of society and sport in ancient Greece, the organization of ancient Roman sports was directly reflective of the core economic and militaristic dimensions of that great civilization.

The Emperors of Ancient Rome routinely used the wealth they accrued from imperial and economic success to please their citizens with the public provision of material opulence and national holidays of leisure.  The culture of conquest and economic extravagance was replicated in Roman sports festivals that featured gladiatorial fighting by paid performers before audiences that were permitted to gamble on outcomes.  Thus, in an advanced commercial and militarily robust society, sports took the form of orchestrated entertainment publicly celebrating the spectacle of violence in amphitheatres throughout the Roman Empire.

In one final example of the constructed connections between core elements of society and sports, hockey in Canada provides a familiar illustration.

As a game originally played outdoors on ice, and that historically showcased tough physical play, hockey not only models the reality of a cold physical environment but also the strength required by Canadian communities to thrive within their geographic contexts.  Parallel to the requisite physicality, hockey players off the ice are also valued for their humility, politeness, and generosity.  When they find these character traits in the everyday comportment of their favourite players, Canadians locate in hockey a particular approach to social conduct and political affairs that many argue distinguishes their culture from that of their neighbours to the south.

This brief history shows that modern sports activities are not merely by-products of society, against which a human group’s politics, economics, and culture collide from time to time.  Rather, society and sports are deeply intertwined, with the latter often deliberately built as a stage on which core features of the former are publicly expressed.

But, if it is really a society’s prized social philosophies and values that are showcased in sports, why should conflicts arise over these features at all?

 

As current tensions in the US remind us, societal values reflect the aspirations of many of its members at the same time as they can exclude the preferences of some.  Serious disagreement over political, economic, or cultural policy can result in social unrest, but this is part of an unavoidable continuous process in which citizens of free societies move between stability and change as they work through defining and institutionalizing their social priorities.  Due precisely to its role in expressing society’s values, there is no escaping the fact that sports is involved in social dynamics that are almost as likely to stir up debate and contestation as they are to promote collective agreement.    

So, just as a political doctrine or an economic policy will not represent the aspirations of all members of a diverse society, the deliberate presentation of some of these features in sports will necessarily promote the interests of some citizens more than others.  This was clearly the case in Greek athletics as women, non-aristocratic males, and slaves were excluded from participation in Olympic competition just as they were from the deliberations of the vaunted first democracy.  And, while fighting and hitting are widely appreciated as reflective of a Canadian style of play, there is also an increasingly restive segment of fans and media pundits willing to speak out against their presence in the game.  

The promotion of a society’s core values contributes to making sports an emotionally compelling experience for its fans.  As fans in Montreal know well, when those values lack full citizen endorsement, the potential for acrimony is always there.   

In the context of the ongoing hockey lockout, what does a consideration of the nation-building functions of sports offer to counter the intense frustration that hockey fans currently feel towards the NHL and the NHLPA?

With knowledge of the relationship between sports and society, the first suggestion is to accept that there is no mystery to the hockey lockout, or to the tactics taken by both sides, and to view it as tied to historic battles over the terms and possibilities of our society’s economic system.  Shaped by and expressive of fault lines that characterize capitalism, the NHL is advocating owner or manager control over the conditions of work while the NHLPA is defending a more cooperative model of economic affairs.  Fans and pundits appear surprised by owner and player greed, but limited restriction on material acquisition is endorsed by the private enterprise economy and by the culture in which it operates.  Despite claims to the contrary, the lockout is a stage on which owners and players are performing societal deliberations, and intense disagreements, over core societal economic principles.

Recognizing the economic values being showcased in the lockout leads to a second suggestion that fans work toward developing specific positions on what is required to resolve it.  It is common to hear that both sides are to blame, but this is a non-position that sidesteps the possibility of forming an informed judgment.  Beyond displeasure resulting from missing the games, or from a lost salary if one’s income depends on the NHL, frustration is also created by confusion over which side’s policy ambitions are most unjust.  Once they see the lockout as similar to management-labour battles waged in their own professional fields, fans can more easily identify the policies advocated by the two sides that require immediate reform in order for the business of hockey to resume and return to being healthy once again.        

With a defined perspective, a final suggestion is for fans to join the deliberations by taking action.  This can mean writing letters to the NHL, the NHLPA, or to specific teams to challenge the details of their stances.  It can take the form of organizing online communities to pressure corporations that do business with the league or the players.  It can also mean developing innovative projects, such as mobilizing to punish the NHL and the players when they return or appropriating popular symbols of hockey to get people involved in social priorities more important than arbitration rights, HRR, and ‘make whole.’  The fans’ power lies in their pocketbook and in their passion, interest, and time.  By communicating clear preferences on the issues, by withdrawing support unless priorities are changed, or by channelling their frustration into either pressure tactics or needed public involvement, fans can use their power during the lockout to get things done.

Because fans are both valuable members of their communities and citizens, seeing hockey as a battleground for a society’s political, economic, or cultural direction need not instil fear.  Just as sports will always be used to express official societal agendas, fans have the power and the right to get involved in the process.  Involvement will not only help to ensure that the games are organized and played as the fans would like, but it would also mean that their communities and their societies are being built according to the visions that are closest to their hearts.           

Hockey Enforcer + Twitter = More Than Just A Rant

In this piece, published on the All Habs online hockey magazine, I go beyond most mainstream sports media and blog accounts in unpacking the Krys Barch Twitter outburst against the NHL owners.

While most media coverage either questioned the significance of Barch's comments or challenged the player's judgment for suggesting that fans feel sorry for him during the hockey lockout, I explore how Barch's position of marginality in the NHL may allow for additional interpretations of the meaning of his words.  In addition to providing insights into the status of solidarity among the players, I suggest that the Barch Tweets give insight into the particular anxieties of the NHL fighter as well as supply an opportunity to assess the role of new media in fan involvement and mobilization vis-a-vis the ongoing NHL lockout.

You can read the online version here.  

Krys Barch, Messages From The Margins

By Avi Goldberg

There has been a fair amount of debate surrounding the Krys Barch Twitter rant from last Saturday night and whether there was any big picture significance to the thoughts of a marginal NHL player.  Judging from the media coverage of the incident, in which the analysis has mostly alternated between slim and scathing, skepticism reigns.  Taking Barch’s marginal status a little more seriously, however, provides an opening for deeper interpretation.  Since people on the margins of social contexts have vantage points of their surroundings that are not as available to everyone else, I would say that the Barch comments do contain some important observations that are worthy of further discussion.

The most obvious significance of Barch’s Twitter talk pertains to the NHL labour negotiation. 

Collective negotiations between two sides in a dispute require that both parties demonstrate solidarity to the public and to each other.  The recent Jimmy Devellano diatribe against the players not only showed the challenge of keeping members of a group in line but also that the owners appear to be steadfastly united in their resolve to resist the players’ claims.

While the fine levied against Devellano provides evidence that Gary Bettman wields a heavy hand in keeping the owners quiet, Donald Fehr’s efforts to forge a new culture of unity among the players has also been noted.  We know that many of the owners have the means to wait things out, but in going rogue, Barch alerts us to the potential that exists for more economically marginal groups of players to speak out against the defined interests of the NHLPA should the cost of lost income become too hard for them to bear.

Beyond lockout politics, a second insight arises from asking what the Barch comments might reveal about the particular anxieties of players like him in today’s NHL.

In referring to the pain his body has endured, his consumption of alcohol, his concern for his ability to provide for his growing family, and in his insinuation that the owners are taking away his ability to do the job he loves, Barch’s pleas put health, safety, and existential threats to hockey’s enforcers on uncomfortable public display.  Not withstanding the influence of alcohol, what would lead him to want to do that?

To establish his credibility, Barch made explicit linkages between the work experiences of hockey fighters and those of other blue collar workers.  While this comparison aims to draw empathy by highlighting the especially wide gaps in privilege that separate the fourth line hockey players from the owners, it may also have been delivered as way to publicly rationalize the on and off-ice stresses and coping strategies that distinguish hockey enforcers from their more widely serviceable teammates and union brethren.

Interpreting Barch’s remarks as expressing a pre-emptive effort to normalize his hockey job does not require logic to be stretched too far.  With acceptance of the fighter’s role as valuable in today’s NHL not nearly as secure as it used to be, in addition to losing their income, enforcers are hovering in a perceived position of weakness. 

A final insight relates to the role of new media in the current version of the lockout.

Is digital media allowing fans to exert leverage on the hockey negotiators in the same manner as protesters are believed to have used online networking to gain new opportunities to shape domestic politics during the Arab Spring?  Or, can the potentials for rapid and wide dissemination of player sentiment on the internet be harnessed to push the league into compromises that it otherwise would not have felt pressure to make?  Does Barch’s Twitter commentary, and its immediate repercussions, yield any tentative answers? 

Getting ordinary people to leave their routines to act in support of a cause requires more than just anger.  Without leadership, strategy, incentives, peer pressure, prominent allies, and meaningful bonds between would be foot soldiers, the translation of anger into effective action usually does not occur.  Had the tweets been written by Sidney Crosby or Claude Giroux, and had they been accompanied by a call for fans to take coordinated action against the NHL, perhaps a new media mobilization potential could have been initiated.  Because they were authored by a relatively marginal hockey figure, with limited public prestige and influence, they have had little traction.  They can be classified as nothing more than one digital narrative of complaint among many others.      

Digital media are currently providing opportunities for fans to communicate with each other about their frustrations and to independently express their individual opinions about the lockout.  Conditions can change, but despite recent claims to the contrary, the deepening of this digital interaction is currently containing the anger to the blogosphere and the twitterverse rather than channelling it in opposition to its perceived source.

Krys Barch was understandably taken to task for tweeting that fans should empathize with athletes who risk losing the potential to continue to earn millions of dollars a year, but our inability to relate to his claims of economic vulnerability is not the only message here.  Seeing him as a player whose specific hockey job may be on the line, and who publicly vented his fears through a communications medium whose independent power to wield influence can easily be exaggerated, Barch’s tweets may signal the anxiety he feels about his ability to control his own life as much as they reveal his anger over the owners’ refusal to agree to the players’ terms for concluding a new CBA.

The Culture of Hockey Fandom

In this piece, published on the All Habs web magazine, I take exception to the notion that the fans of hockey would be foolish or pathetic if they were to return to support the NHL at the end of the current lockout.  While hockey, and sports in general, can be rightly criticized for its various excesses, it also provides numerous avenues of meaningful social, intellectual, and leisure activity for its fans.

Influenced by sociological theory addressing the role of culture in bringing members of society together, I defend the fans against charges that there is something obscene about the dependence they have developed on their sports and on their participation within hockey fandom communities.

You can find the web version of the piece here.  

Cheering For the Fans

By Avi Goldberg

In the early days of the NHL lockout, much attention has been directed towards hockey fans.  Talking points have ranged from accusations that Gary Bettman takes the fans for fools to suggestions that the lockout is an opportunity for them to wean themselves off their obsessive involvement with a sports business whose economics are too unseemly to deserve their time and money.  A shared theme is that hockey fans are irrational, both for loving their sport so much and for returning so quickly when it is temporarily taken away from them.  Accompanying these views is the insinuation that fans should stay away when the lockout ends.  There are compelling reasons why this outcome will not, and arguably should not, happen.

Sport in general, and hockey in Canada in particular, must be viewed as part of a society’s way of life, or culture.  While culture exists to guide members of a group, we give the elements of culture multiple meanings in addition to their intended functions.  Just as religious practice can mean more than worshipping a higher power and mobile phones provide experiences that surpass the convenience afforded by carrying a tool to makes calls, fan involvement with hockey creates significant routines that transcend tracking wins and losses of favourite teams.

Above all, hockey is a social experience in which fans join with friends, family, and sometimes with strangers in bars or via the internet, to participate in the action.  There is no doubt that the plays, points, and outcomes matter, but there is much more to it than that.

Given the comfort that comes from being with others, joking and laughing with them during the games, and from sharing food or drink at the same time, it can be credibly argued that fans willingly pay the price of admission just to be able to experience group connection that all humans need.  Hockey, as experienced through its multiple platforms of activity, is a significant source and locus of everyday social belonging for its fans.

Second, many fans are routinely involved in hockey because it enables them to exercise their minds in creative ways.  When fans debate the greatness of the players, argue over issues like fighting or blindside hits, or when they dissect the strategies of coaches or GMs, they engage in cognitive stimulation that has positive social effects.

Fans may not always get to express their passions at the workplace or even at home, but when they do it over hockey, they contribute their unique perspectives to the discussions that are ongoing within their communities.  Telling and sharing of stories help communities to imagine their togetherness.  Fans connect with hockey because it allows them to weave their own ideas into the narratives that circulate and shape the identities of their social groups.

Finally, while some dismiss the leisure experienced by hockey fans as something that distracts them from activities that are of true importance in life, the legitimacy of fan emotion should not be denied.  Creating everyday fun through hockey fandom is but one of many ways that networks of individuals carve out spaces of autonomy for themselves within the confines of modern society.  Far from being a crass distraction from the pursuit of an authentic quality of life, the pleasure of everyday fan experience is both intrinsically valuable as well as a meaningful by-product of choices that society members make to author the terms of their own social realities.

Because it is an outdated notion to only see the pleasures of the so-called higher forms of culture as being uplifting to members of society, it is unfair to reject the emotional roller coaster ride of fan life as a mere waste of time. 

With hockey providing so much richness to the everyday lives of its fans, is there any logical reason to think that the current lockout could, or should, encourage fans to stay away once it is finally resolved?  

One recent interpretation suggests that the lockout represents a clash over ideologies in which the owners are fighting to apply the economic philosophies they promote in the wider society to the NHL.  From this reading, it could be argued that should fans be drawn into an ideological battle, the potential exists for a mass exodus from the game in response to the imposition of an economic system in hockey that violates their own values.

Of course, for this to actually occur, hockey fans would have to be as engaged in the affairs of economic philosophy as the owners are.  Given, however, the sense that fans and pundits are united in their disdain and indifference towards the intricacies of the positions advanced by both sides in the dispute, the implications of the fight over competing ideologies appear not to be grabbing fan attention this time around.

Fan mobilization away from the NHL, to either advocate for or against the implementation of particular economic principles in hockey and/or society, is a highly remote possibility.

With ideological matters far from their hearts and minds, hockey fans are anxious for the players, the teams, the games, and the meaningful cultures of their fandom to return once the lockout does come to an end.  Given the legitimate ways that engaging with hockey gives meaning to their lives, there is nothing irrational or foolish about it.